On Thursday on November 26 (American Thanksgiving Day), with happy hearts, Van, Liberty, Michelle and I headed to Toronto to apply for our visas. We had all the original documents we needed, or so we thought. (Cue sad music)

Once there the front desk clerk told us that there is still one missing piece of paper, a Letter of Invitation (LOI) from a new government office. We managed to get up to a visa clerk’s desk and get some answers to questions we did ask, and some we did not even know to ask.

The first interesting tidbit is that the missing LOI should have been issued with the all-important Work Permit. Praise God, we do have the Work Permit (which tells us Shane is approved by the highest levels of government). But, the cleck emphasized that there is no way to have a Work Permit without the corresponding LOI. Where then is this LOI? The clerk figures that the school officials simply forgot to include this LOI when they mailed us the other originals.

Why would they forget this? Turns out it is a new requirement. So new in fact that another Canadian friend of ours have a similar delay in Sept for several weeks, and she is even connected to the best state school in the province. If they did not know, then the small school in the small town we are headed too can be forgiven for not knowing either. (*note: another friend also just wrote us to say they too had an issue with the same LOI with their school.)

Additionally, the official at the school we are going to is new (3 years); the school has not hired a Canadian in over 5 years; and there have been several rule changes the past few years anyway.

All this to say, it is now a matter of the school finding that missing LOI and posting it to us. Whether they use the slow method like last time (3 weeks!) or a faster method remains to be seen. We have asked them, of course, to use a faster method.

Please pray then that they find the LOI and post it to us soon. We hope they haven’t lost it which would mean more time is needed to get the Work Permit and corresponding LOI re-issued. Plus, we are quickly coming to a point in time where the schools will start to shut down for the holidays in January, so we need to be there in December. We need to be there in December because registering with the police can take a couple weeks, and we need to have that finished within 4 weeks of our arrival in the country.

Thank you for your prayers! Thank you for standing with us, and believing God has great things in store for the city to which we are headed.

UPDATE: We did hear from a school official whose title is Waiban (pronounced Why-Bahn) and she told us they are working on it. Her choice of words makes us wonder… the LOI should be there, it was issued with the Work Permit, so what are they “working on”?